Confessions of a Bookseller

by Shaun Bythell

  Callum was already working in the bothy when I got there. He’s reached a bit of an impasse and is waiting for Danny, the plumber, who was supposed to be here today.

  At 2.30 p.m. Nicky reminded me that we had a Gaelic choir booked in to rehearse in the big room, so I hurriedly prepared it for them. They arrived at three.

  Since it was a sunny day, I decided to eat my lunch in the garden but was slightly put off when I discovered a dead crow in the middle of the lawn, so I dug a small hole and gave it a decent burial. The cat will probably exhume its corpse and drag it into the house.

  Till Total £250.96

  21 Customers

  MONDAY, 22 JUNE

  Online orders: 5

  Orders found: 2

  Flo was in today, so I left at 10 a.m. to catch the ferry to Belfast to look at some books for a probate valuation. I arrived at the house (near the Botanic Gardens) at about 3 p.m. and met the executor of the estate, the dead man’s brother, a much younger man than I had expected, with an impressive ginger moustache. There were books all over the house, and a lot of antiquarian Scottish material. By five I was only about a quarter of the way through them, so I told him that I’d need to stay the night and finish them in the morning. He recommended a nearby hotel, which thankfully had a vacancy. I called Flo and she’s agreed to open the shop tomorrow.

  Till Total £120

  12 Customers

  TUESDAY, 23 JUNE

  Online orders: 3

  Orders found: 0

  Flo opened the shop, so I continued to work my way through the rest of the books in the house in Belfast. The total for probate valuation came to £10,000, which is by far the highest probate valuation I’ve ever given. The collection contained two copies of Camden’s Britannia and a number of other books that were in the high hundreds. As always with probate valuations, it was a lower figure than I would expect the books to realise at a sale. The deceased man’s brother and I discussed what to do with them; I told him that I’m not in a position to offer anything like that amount and that they should go into a Scottish saleroom.

  Caught the 3.30 ferry and was back home by 7 p.m.

  Went for a walk in the garden (avoiding the spot where the dead crow had been) and picked a large bowl of strawberries from the polytunnel.

  Till Total £247.25

  20 Customers

  WEDNESDAY, 24 JUNE

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 0

  Flo was in again today. I’m not sure why we’re managing to find so few of our orders. I will contact Monsoon again and see what the problem is.

  The shop has been a complete mess for several weeks now, with piles of books everywhere – partly because the contents of the back of the garden room (now the bothy) are now scattered throughout it, partly because people keep bringing boxes of books in to sell.

  Telephone call from a woman at Radio Scotland at 11 a.m. to see whether I had any thoughts on Amazon’s latest controversial policy: only paying authors of books that sell on Kindle a royalty based on the number of pages that the purchaser reads. I suspect she wanted me to say that I thought this was wonderful and would drive people back to books, but this is not the case and the consumer rarely cares about such trifles as whether the author receives a royalty or not. I posted the news on Facebook and the following discussion ensued:

  John Francis Ward: hmm … and if I order a meal and only eat part of it, could I only pay for that bit? It rather takes us back to Victorian times, with serialisation – maybe I could start selling my books to Amazon a page at a time? It is an extension of an uncertainty that already exists, in that a book is never sold till someone buys it from the shop – up to that point, it might yet be returned. The one good thing about it is that it might put more writers off dealing with Amazon.

  Page & Blackmore Booksellers Ltd: I think Amazon’s idea is that you will pay for the whole meal you ordered but that the cook will be paid only for however much of it you actually eat.

  Callum was in, working on the bothy. The plasterer came in and did about two-thirds of the plastering and said that he’d be back next Thursday to finish it off.

  A customer wearing Crocs and red shorts and with a squat, aggressive dog, spent an hour going through the boxes on the floor, leaving everything in piles all over the place while the dog growled at passers-by. They left without buying anything.

  I was shovelling sand from the large tote bag (which has been on the pavement between my shop and Fiona’s next door since we started work on the bothy about a month ago) when her husband, Robbie, appeared and told me that he was disappointed to see it going, and that it had made a welcome addition to the landscape of the high street. It has been there for so long that weeds have grown in it and are now setting seed.

  Before closing the shop, I went to the bank in Newton Stewart and stopped at the bakers on the way back to the van to buy a sausage roll. The woman behind the counter told me, ‘I love the music video you did in the shop.’ Anna, Nicky and I had done a parody of ‘Rapper’s Delight’ last year and put it on Facebook. I forget whose idea it was – either Nicky or Anna – but I remember walking into the kitchen one night after work to find the pair of them excitedly planning the choreography and the lyrics. Apparently our version is very popular in China.

  After I shut the shop I drove to Rigg Bay, about 7 miles away, and went for a swim. It was completely deserted, and although the sea has yet to warm up noticeably, it was a refreshing end to the day, after shovelling sand for most of the afternoon. My friend Michele refers to Rigg Bay as ‘the Kate Moss of beaches’ because it is impossible to take a bad photograph of it.

  Till Total £407.98

  37 Customers

  THURSDAY, 25 JUNE

  Online orders: 7

  Orders found: 7

  At lunchtime a lorry arrived with a delivery of ninety-six sacks of pellets for the new boiler. At exactly the same time the carpet fitter turned up to fit the new doormat at the entrance to the shop. Callum and I were wrestling with removing the front door so that the fitters could get to work when the map rep appeared too and stood patiently by as we struggled. The final player on the crowded stage was a customer, who repeatedly said ‘Excuse me’ until I reluctantly let go of the door and politely asked what she wanted – ‘What’s your wifi password?’

  At 3 p.m. a couple came in; hard to tell the gender of either of them from either their appearance or their voice. One of them asked, ‘Where is your palmistry books?’

  Once everything had settled down, and the carpet fitters were working away, I bought a box of books from a woman. Included a first edition of The War of the Worlds (1898, Heinemann).

  Till Total £165.98

  16 Customers

  FRIDAY, 26 JUNE

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Nicky arrived at 9.15 a.m., late as usual. She hijacked the Facebook page and commented, ‘First disappointment of the day … 2 beer boxes and 8 wine boxes filled with … yup, books.’

  Appointment with the physiotherapist in Newton Stewart at 2 p.m. She gave me two pages of exercises to do, three times a day.

  Closed the shop at 5 p.m. and went to the pub with Callum. Returned at seven to find a tiny dog turd on the doorstep. I know exactly whose dog is responsible.

  Till Total £298.36

  28 Customers

  SATURDAY, 27 JUNE

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Nicky’s decided to update Facebook about our progress with the bothy:

  Garden Room Bothy update at 5.10 p.m. yesterday …

  ‘So, shall we put the door on tonight?’

  ‘Ummmm’

  ‘You could collect it in the van and we could hang it tonight’

  ‘Ummmm’

  ‘Or we could just do it tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, although I do have the van.’

  ‘Yeah, and we could put it on tonight’

  ‘Maybe we should’


  ‘Or we could do it tomorrow’…

  No door has been hung.

  All a bit rich, considering that she’d been ‘tidying up’ the English topography section and it looked very much like a freshly ransacked house.

  After lunch I drove to Dumfries to catch the train for Eliot’s son’s christening, or naming ceremony, as it is being euphemistically called. On the way there the road was closed and diverted through Carsluith due to an accident. There was a Land Rover in the middle of a field, but it didn’t look too bad. An hour later, as I was on the train, I received a message from Anna telling me that Robbie Murphie – whose wife, Fiona, has the shop next door to mine – had been killed on his motor bike in the accident. Robbie was a thoroughly decent man, and an excellent GP. Everyone who knew him had the utmost respect for him, and although it always sounds trite when someone young has died, he was so well known and liked in the community that his absence will be keenly felt. He was a rare combination of relentless good humour, quick wit and kindness.

  Till Total £286.27

  19 Customers

  MONDAY, 29 JUNE

  Online orders: 4

  Orders found: 1

  Checked Facebook first thing this morning to discover further hijacking of the page by Nicky on Saturday:

  yee heuch! Traditional musicians in the square (loudspeakers on! – in yer face Radio 3), the smell of sweaty horses as they canter past the door giving a cheeky wee buck to thrill the crowds, as the Riding of the Marches is introduced after an absence of 60 years! Beer! Can it get any better? Yes! Shaun’s in London!

  Flo in. As always, she made the bare minimum of effort to find today’s orders, in part owing to the fact that today is her eighteenth birthday, which in her world absolves her of the requirement to do anything productive in the workplace.

  The garden is in full bloom, and the scent of blossom fills the evening air. A particular favourite is a shrub I planted next to a gateway, Viburnum x Burkwoodii. According to the retired gardener of Galloway House (the seat of the earls of Galloway), the last incumbent to live there insisted on having them planted next to the French windows of the dining room, so that he could savour the scent while he ate.

  At almost eleven o’clock it was still light enough to sit outside on a bench with a beer and read as the bats flitted by.

  Till Total £260.47

  27 Customers

  TUESDAY, 30 JUNE

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 2

  Flo in, mildly hungover after her eighteenth birthday last night.

  A customer with a braided beard asked, ‘How much is this copy of the Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1938? I’m quite interested in it.’

  Me: It’s £35.

  Customer: What! That’s outrageous. Who would want to buy that?

  Well, you for a start.

  As I was getting changed into my work clothes (painting, gardening sort of work, rather than pricing books up), I spotted several moths flying around the bedroom, so I checked my kilt and tweed suit. Both have suffered heavy losses in the war of moth attrition, so I will unleash the Doom moth killer when I’m next away for a few days and fumigate the room.

  Must get round to doing my back exercises. They look so boring that I keep making excuses for not doing them.

  Till Total £193

  13 Customers

  JULY

  It is not often we second-hand booksellers go into one of these spick-and-span places where books are garbed in their paper jackets like women in coloured waterproofs on a crowded railway platform. As like as not, the seller of new books nowadays has to go nap on a Fancy Department where you can buy anything from pen-nibs to photo frames. It’s a sad fall, and a sign of the times. Will the day come, I wonder, when second-hand booksellers must run a department where you can buy cough-drops, aspirin and pickles? God forbid. We have our pride. Mr Pumpherston never uses the word second-hand; he says it reminds him of an old clothes shop. The lettering above his door tells folk that he is an Antiquarian Bookseller. I wonder what some of the shabby books on the sixpenny stall outside think when they take a keek upwards. Maybe they puff out their tattered chests and reflect after all there is some dignity in death.

  Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller

  Muir is correct that we second-hand booksellers don’t darken the doors of ‘spick-and-span places’, but that’s largely because most of our businesses are owner-run and can no longer afford staff, so we’re stuck in our own little worlds most of the time, surrounded by dusty books. I can’t really think of a more pleasant environment, but it has drawbacks, and whenever I have the opportunity, if I’m travelling, I’ll nose out other second-hand bookshops to see what they’re doing, and whether they have any ideas I can steal or diversify.

  He’s also right about sellers of new books having had to adapt and sell other things. It seems like a remarkably prescient observation, and could have been written just a few years ago in its relevance to the changes ravaging both the new and the secondhand book industries thanks to the icy grip of Amazon, but to talk of Amazon is to start ploughing a field that is already well furrowed. I sincerely hope, though, that I won’t end up having to sell cough drops, aspirin and pickles in order to provide the financial security to allow me to continue selling books.

  Muir was uncannily prescient though, in his prediction that ‘cough-drops, aspirin and pickles’ would be sold beside books on the shelf. He could have added almost any product to his short list and described the modern supermarket.

  As for the antiquarian versus second-hand argument, the meaning of the word is sufficiently vague that I suppose Pumpherston could get away with calling himself an antiquarian dealer since he is ‘dealing in, or interested in old or rare books’. Generally, though, antiquarian tends to imply an age of well over a hundred years, and of sufficient interest and quality to have significant value. A cheap hundred-year-old church hymnbook might technically qualify as antiquarian, but few dealers would ever attempt to pass it off as such.

  WEDNESDAY, 1 JULY

  Online orders: 3

  Orders found: 1

  Flo in. Callum came in to help the plumber, who apparently talked all day about local gossip and fitted two pipes, which Callum assured me should have taken about half an hour. Still, a small step further forward with the plumbing.

  Anne Barclay turned up to collect the marquee (which I bought a few years ago under the deluded notion that I might have a fortieth birthday party) for Relay for Life. Anne runs the Wigtown Book Festival and is a stalwart, working tirelessly organising all manner of things, including the cancer fundraiser Relay.

  In the afternoon I drove to Edinburgh with Anna to go to the Queen’s garden party at Holyrood Palace. It was packed, and we bumped into quite a few people we knew. Anna had prepared a speech in case the Queen decided to talk to her, but considering the 8,000 other people there, it came as no surprise that she wasn’t picked to be engaged in conversation. Anna’s version of reality is very much that of a romantic American who has watched too many Ealing comedies. I think in her imagination the Queen regularly has people like us around for tea parties.

  We drove home via Prestwick airport to pick up Emanuela, the Italian woman who has volunteered to work in the shop for the summer. Prestwick is not known for its glamour. Even its slogan (‘Pure dead brilliant’) hardly evokes the sophisticated world of international air travel. I’ve often ruminated on the wisdom of the person who signed off on an airport using the word ‘dead’ in its marketing brand. Emanuela cut rather a stylish dash among the denizens of the Arrivals lounge, quite tall and slim, and well dressed. She talked all the way home, but I barely understood a word she said. Her written English is considerably better than her spoken English, which – while it may well have been perfect – was rendered in an accent so strong as to make it almost unintelligible. The ‘ghost vowel’ that is characteristic of many Italians speaking English is certainly present in Emanuel
a’s version, so everything is prefixed and suffixed with the letter ‘a’. We arrived home at about 7 p.m., with Anna visibly unhappy that there’s another woman in the house (the bothy, predictably, isn’t ready yet). Unlike Emanuela, she was completely silent for the entire journey back from Prestwick, and her usual sunny disposition and delight in everything around her seemed cloaked in a heavy cloud.

  Till Total £108.20

  22 Customers

  THURSDAY, 2 JULY

  Online orders: 2

  Orders found: 1

  There seems to be a problem with Amazon’s FBA marketplace. We’ve had no orders for some time now. Flo emailed them, and managed to have it working again by the end of the day.

  Emanuela appeared at 9 a.m. from the spare room, so I showed her around the shop and set her to tidy the shelves and familiarise herself with the layout. This was the first job John Carter gave me when I worked for him in the weeks before I took over the shop, and undeniably one of the most useful, as knowing where each section and subject is will enable you to answer 80 per cent of customer questions, but I have no idea how this is going to work with Emanuela’s spoken English. Every time I say anything to her she cranes her neck and looks at me like a turkey through her incredibly thick glasses, and says ‘Sorry?’ Usually three or four repetitions will eventually result in some form of understanding. She also insists on pronouncing my name as ‘Shone’, and describes her way of speaking as ‘Chinese English’. It’s almost like a poor parody of some politically incorrect comedian from the 1970s impersonating an Italian.